Telecommunication networks provide for the transmission of information across some distance through terrestrial, wireless or satellite communication networks. Such communications may involve voice, data or multimedia information, among others. One particular aspect of such networks is data centers. Generally, data centers are facilities or portions of a network that utilize computer systems, such as telecommunications equipment and storage systems, to store data accessible to users of the network. For example, data comprising web pages are often stored in storage elements of data centers and accessible through one or more networks connected to the data center by the users of the network. In this manner, users to the network can access the data from the data centers to perform any number of functions.
However, data stored at data centers of a network may be vulnerable to certain types of attacks that affect the availability or integrity of the stored data. For example, a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack may be used against certain data stored at the data center, such as data that is used to create web pages. A DDOS attack is a coordinated attack against one or more applications operating on a data center. The attack utilizes multiple compromised computing systems to flood the targeted application with traffic, i.e. data packets that the application cannot keep up with, which in many situations, crashes the application or makes the application otherwise unavailable to other users of the network. It is often difficult to counteract these attacks, as the data packets are sent from multiple IP addresses (preventing the simple blockage of packets from a single IP address). Further, it is often difficult to distinguish between legitimate packets from malicious packets. As a result of DDOS attacks or other types of security vulnerabilities of data centers, the data or application stored in the data center may not be available to legitimate users of the network, thereby reducing the reliability of the data center.
It is with these and other issues in mind that various aspects of the present disclosure were developed.